Adam Savage's Plan to Banish Boring Science Education

American teenagers want to invent the solutions that power our future, but feel unprepared by science education—and their newest test scores are backing up that sad state of affairs. All of which has MythBuster and Popular Mechanics contributing editor Adam Savage pretty fired up.

Check out an excerpt from our exclusive interview here—including Savage's take on everything from No Child Left Behind to the evolution debate in America's schools—then listen and subscribe to PM's biweekly news podcast on iTunes or your RSS feeds below!

Just a couple hours before your legions of fans learned the truth about Moon conspiracy theories, legions of numbers came back on the truth about American SAT scores: Overall results aren't improving, math scores are at their lowest in years, and the minority gap is growing. Now I know you're more about hands-on tests than hands filling in ovals on paper, but what does that kind of number crunching say to you about the bigger problems here—and about our future scientists?

With all this "accountability," which sounds really good from a political stump but is really actually quite difficult and nefarious in the field, the "accountability" means you've got a bunch of teachers who are trying to teach to a test, which is very different than trying to get kids to learn.

Fair enough. Now some people see a fundamental lack of understanding even the scientific method in our schools today. Do you think elementary and high-school teachers in this country are good enough—or that they should be paid more?

The teachers aren't the problem. I do think we should pay them more. I think we should properly reward them for doing I think the most important job there is. As far as the scientific method, [sighs] we've got national papers actually discussing the idea that there's a debate between evolution and something else, when among all scientists in the world for the past 150 years there isn't a debate between evolution and something else. And that doesn't help anybody.

As off-the-shelf as some of your MythBusters rigs can be, your show is still, in a couple ways, a lot better funded than even some of the top research labs in this country. What's the fundamental problem with supporting the sciences beyond high school and in, you know, graduate schools? Do you not see that as a huge issue?

What I do see as a huge issue is a very anti-science vibe. Like I said, the newspapers talking about evolution versus creationism is very much an attack on science as a type of religion—believing that the scientific method is some type of religious belief. And it's not! That kind of attack absolutely is damaging science exploration across the whole country. I do think that's a significant problem. And until we can get our head out of the sand and realize that science isn't about truth—it's why this debate about the "theory of evolution" bugs the hell out of me. What scientists mean by theory is very different than what people think.

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